The Right of Kings
by ArgentNoelle
Summary: If Ciel had not been quite as unhinged, if Agni hadn't died, but the elder brother had still revealed himself. The game board is in flux, and secrets will soon be secrets no more. (AU from chapter 126)
1. On Loyalty

(1) On Loyalty

He still feels a lingering frustration from the Sphere Music Hall case, and Lizzy's continued disappearance is a puzzle that he can't solve, a knot of worry in his stomach that feeds off his already too-active paranoia. The visit to the townhouse is just what Ciel needs to wind down; when he gets there, Soma tells him that Agni has made sweets, and that makes the whole terrible world better, if only for one moment. Ciel would never turn down an offer of sweets, and Agni's rival Sebastian's own. He is too tired to be angry anymore, to be scared; and Soma tells him he won't leave his side, won't listen to excuses. It makes Ciel want to scream, it makes a sick feeling rise under the sugar that coats his tongue. That devotion is too familiar: he has seen it on too many people.

On Doll, who gave him her trust without asking any questions. On Snake, who believes every lie, if it means he can be in a family. On Finnian, who reminds him of himself, whose eyes still bear too much innocence, whose hands are stained with blood through every fault but his own. On Sieglinde, who followed his every advice, except the one to be careful, to be safe. To keep out of the shadows in which he drowns, and pulls them all in after him.

On Lizzy, who used to look at him (at who?) with such devotion, and who has disappeared, driven away, after everything.

It rains during the night, and the townhouse is lit by flashes of lightning. It reminds him of times long ago, when he (the scared child) would crawl into his parents' bed, and feel safe between their arms. Yes. His brother would usually wake up after him and crawl in besides, and when he closed his eyes then, none of it mattered. Not the fact that he was the weak, sickly one; not the fact that he was and had always been the spare. All he knew then was that he was loved, and happy. Yes. He, too, had looked at his brother with those eyes, but it had not helped him. The knife had still come down. His screams had still torn his throat. His cries had still gone unanswered.

The dead are still dead.

It is for these reasons that storms still disturb him. The sounds and light-show have long ceased to hold menace, but the memories they carry linger. It fills the air next morning, an insubstantial scent mixing with petrichor and the water that floods the surface of the cobblestones, that dots everything with a fine mist, leaving him shivering even in his top hat and cloak. Soma and Agni wave goodbye, and Ciel watches out the carriage window as it jostles away from the city and toward the manor.

… "Young master?"

He's too preoccupied to really take note of the servants' surprise, but their words reach him through a haze. "It's so early! We thought you hadn't gone out yet."

"What the devil are you talking about," Ciel mutters. The case still needs to be solved; he has nothing more than vague suspicions, a pattern with no one to pin it on; and Lizzy is still gone.

A low, amused chuckle comes from the head of the stairs, and for a moment, Ciel is too tired and baffled to make the connection. Any connection at all. "Me," the voice says.

He looks up. He looks up, and—freezes.

"I am Ciel Phantomhive," his brother says. "And I've come home."

/

The next hours are a blur. He doesn't remember standing shivering in the entryway; he is barely cognizant of being ushered into the parlor by Tanaka, to be served tea by _him_ as though he is a guest in his own home. Sitting on one of the couches. Watching his—his—

Watching Ciel Phantomhive sitting in the chair that belongs to him, all poise and grace, as though nothing is wrong, and all the while his world slowly cracks beneath him, tips sideways, loses its moorings. Until he does not know what to do at all.

Undertaker is there, standing behind him—Ciel, the real Ciel, the earl, the way Sebastian stands behind the spare. Both giving each other measured looks; the Undertaker's inscrutable, Sebastian's dark. While Undertaker explains how it is that Ciel is alive. (Not alive.) While Ciel explains that he has come back to take the burden from the spare's shoulders, a burden he was never meant to have. That the small, weak child could never take. Of course. Of course not.

"I'm doing this for you, brother, just as you kept this place, and this title, for me," Ciel says, earnestly.

"Of course," he says. Blankly. He cannot argue. He cannot breathe.

"I want to make this as easy on the both of us as possible," Ciel says. "I won't reveal your deception; I'll give you as much money as you like to start over—under your own name, this time. Or another one, if you're really so fond of living in the shadows," he adds, with a bright, carefree laugh.

"Of course," he says. "How thoughtful of you."

Ciel smiles at him. "Well, how could I not take care of my little brother?"

I'm not, he thinks. I haven't been him for years. I'm not the spare; he is dead. He has been burned, his bones turned to dust. And you are not my brother. Not my brother at all. Only a doll that looks and talks like how the Undertaker thought you might be if you had lived, pulled along by your one abiding wish. He keeps waiting for Ciel—the thing—no, he is too real to be a thing—yet, still—to pounce, to open his mouth wide and groan for blood, but. He doesn't.

Ciel gives him all the servants, out of his generosity. Recognizing their loyalty to him. 'Giving them' —as though everything that he possesses is at the earl's whim. It is.

Everything but Sebastian; Sebastian, who was cut short at every remark by a cold word from Ciel, cut short with every word in his own defence that he could not articulate, every word for the family name, the Phantomhive honor, oh, what does it matter now?

It has never been his to keep. He was a fool to think his theft might go unremarked.

 _The times have been, that, when the brains were out, the man would die, and there an end; but now they rise again, with twenty mortal murders on their crowns, and push us from our stools._

It is strangely funny. He almost laughs.

They are stuck entertaining in the parlor until Elizabeth is invited in.

Oh. There she is, he thinks dully. At this point, nothing surprises him anymore. The pain to see her _there_ is only a hollow ache, the wound is numbing.

She is wearing the same clothes she'd been in when she'd been taken from the hall. He notices it. It is not like her. Her dress is pure white with black at the sash and the gloves with their black lace, black and white like a photograph, washed out, on double exposure, ghostly, hardly there. And yet Ciel looks more real than it seems right for him to be. He invites her over with one careless gesture, and she hangs onto his arm, head down, only speaking a few words against him, falling silent. He can only utter her name. She says nothing. There is nothing to say.

I'm sorry? He isn't. He only wishes it had never come to this. He can't feel remorse for his own actions. He can't blame her for hers.

"Well! This is comfy," Undertaker says, with a chuckle. "It's a right family reunion."

He is given a spare bedroom to sleep in, that night. Ciel has… re-taken his rightful room, and he has nothing in him to dispute the gesture. He finds himself robbed of words (In life, there are only two kinds of people… and how the tables can turn, in only the blink of an eye).

Sebastian is unable to coax anything from him, as he prepares him for bed. He stares up, unsleeping, at the ceiling and the not his things in the not his house and feels like crying. He has not cried—not really cried—for years. That was something that small, weak version of him, the one that was locked in that cage and kicked at, punched, branded, worse—that is what those children would have done. He. He doesn't. It's hard to tell himself that he has grown past it when his past has shown up in his house and taken everything he fought for, everything he built. Through trickery, yes, but then. Who doesn't.

He gets up after an hour of tossing and turning, slips on a robe and makes his way into the servants' wing. One flimsy door is all that separates it from the main manor, and yet he feels the screaming pit that has eaten away at his brain, at all his limbs, loosen a little. Knowing he is in a place where they are loyal only to him. Where he is only who he has chosen to be, and not what others have made of him.

This is the fourth time he's been to Sebastian's room. It is just as barren, as blank of all personality, and yet with the butler in it, it seems to reflect his presence. He is sitting in a nightshirt, on the bed, half-under the covers, and staring into the distance with a furrowed brow and a downturned mouth. When he was earl, Sebastian spent most nights wandering the manor, preparing for the next morning. Obviously, the butler feels no such obligation to this new earl. Perhaps he, too, feels uneasy in that other part of the house, where those who are meant to be are.

Ciel slips in and closes the door behind him without a word. He crawls on the bed next to Sebastian and lets him pull the covers up over him, and hold him, though the night is dark and clear, and there is no rain, no lightning, no peals of thunder shaking the sky.

The stars are out.

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	2. On Influence

Ciel, Earl Phantomhive, and his spare, are no longer identical. From apart, they look almost the same, but the closer they stand together, the more the differences show. Ciel, for one, is taller.

They used to be the same height.

The assets from Funtom are being transferred somewhere he, the spare, can keep them. Enough money to let him and a few others live in relative ease, if not luxury, for the remainder of their lives. If he chooses to stay in the shadows. If he chooses to leave, and take his shame with him into the dark, instead of broadcasting it to the world the way Ciel has asked him to do every day since he returned. His certainty has only grown more fierce, though: there is nothing for him, here. He doesn't know what he will do without it, but there is no alternative. He can't live under the thumb of another's sufferance. And he can't leave.

It is a bare few centimeters, but it wrenches—having to look up to meet his brother's (not-brother's) eyes. His brother (not-brother) whose voice has started to deepen the way his own hasn't. Who looks more like his predecessor than he ever could. There is something rough, something slightly unrefined, about Ciel—the way when Ciel swears, his voice slips into the Undertaker's accent, while the spare's own stays smooth and cold.

They have sworn quite a bit, these past few days; whenever Elizabeth is not in the room to see the indecorousness. It is somehow gratifying to see the cracks in the veneer, the places where this Ciel is not a mere memory of his brother, a mere copy of himself. It is gratifying to see Ciel's patience wearing thin as he replies in ever-firmer tones that he intends to leave, taking his money with him, leaving the title and everything else to his brother. It is as though Ciel wanted a fight; wanted a drama of epic proportions. The only thing he is not prepared for is for the spare to simply walk away. As though it doesn't matter to him at all.

It does. But he has never lost a game of poker, and he is not going to start now.

"You deserve better than that," Ciel is saying. "If you stayed, think of the things we could do together."

He laughs.

"Why do you have to be so bloody difficult?" Ciel snaps. He is bending over a pool cue; with his extra height and his heeled shoes, he takes every shot standing; as though to drive in the fact that he doesn't have to cheat. He, the spare, finds himself looking for the retaliation that will poke back the hardest. He is at the other end of the table, sitting on the edge of the board, like a child, and swinging his feet: his brother misses. Then he lines up his own cue and takes the last four balls in two shots, not missing once. The black one is the last to disappear.

"I'm not being difficult," he says calmly. "I think this will be the best thing for me. Or do you intend to fucking keep me here against my will? That would be an interesting next move."

"You're not a prisoner here," Ciel says, using his name after, like a knife twisting in a wound. He watches the way the spare's mouth tightens, the reminder making him tense; and he smiles cruelly. "I'm just trying to get you to see reason. You always seemed to have more ambitions than this: I don't want to see you crawl into a hole and die."

"The hole you crawled out of, you mean?" he says. "I'm sure it's been nice and warm there, in the Undertaker's coffins."

"It is," Ciel says. "It might do you some good. But to be honest, I'm beginning to think you're too much of a thickheaded little brat for even death to keep you."

"You would know, wouldn't you?"

"Can't you believe that Undertaker cares about us—" Ciel says, and bites off the rest of his sentence. He puts down his pool cue and strides to the window, while the spare doesn't deign to get off the pool table but instead leans back on his hands.

"I'm sure he loves you. He does have a disturbing interest in all things dead."

"And you," Ciel says, turning back so the late-afternoon sun drenches his outline in gold and casts his face in shadow. "Acting so high and mighty, when you're as good as dead yourself. Look at you!" he laughs. Not coldly: he hasn't learned the trick of that, of making even one's amusement carry no hint of warmth, only of threat. Instead it's a crazy, uncontrolled thing that sets him on edge; it reminds him of Undertaker. It is too honest. "You haven't changed since you were ten. If I'm a doll, what are you to your butler?"

"His master," he says. Unconcerned. "That's all I need to be."

"Is that so? All I'm thinking is maybe it's not just the soul he's keeping you for. He does seem awfully particular about how you dress."

He resists the impulse to throw the last, white ball at his brother's head. One assumes it wouldn't hurt him too much, being dead and all. Undertaker is quite good at patching these things up. Still, that would only admit defeat.

/

On the rare times when his brother has not accosted him, he runs into Lizzy standing in unconventional places; she is progressing quite far in her eavesdropping skills, though she still has not said a word to him. Not till today, at least. She is in another black-and-white dress, and he feels like snapping at her that if everyone wanted to dress like Sebastian, why don't they make it a masqued ball. There are enough secrets to go round for that. She has a black and white fan patterned in chequered squares, and she flips it closed with a snapping motion when he comes down the hall. She can tell that it is him at once; he knows, because she looks him in the eye, instead of peering at the floor as though she wants to become one with the carpet.

"There you are," she says sweetly, adding his name on at the end like a drop of poison.

"Elizabeth. How do you do."

For a moment, her attacking stance drops; for a moment, he thinks he can recognize something of the old Lizzy behind this new bitter, mourning woman.

"Was he right?"

"What?" The look in her eyes has untethered him, and it is so hard not to ask her to hold him, to say sorry, to ask for her forgiveness or even her tolerance, if nothing else. To ask if she is well.

"Was Ciel right. About. Sebastian's… intentions toward you."

"I don't know and I honestly couldn't care less," the spare says bluntly. "He could never take advantage of me, Lizzy, if you're worrying."

"I am not…" Lizzy takes a frustrated breath, and her hand around her fan points as though wishing it was something longer and sharper, that she could threaten him with. "Worrying. But you… you're turning down his charity, and Ciel thinks that the shock, on top of everything, might have unhinged you… I don't believe him! But… you make it hard to…"

"Trust me? I thought I was a liar?" he snaps.

She closes up.

"I don't know why I bother," she says harshly, and stalks away.

/

He has stopped even the pretense of sleeping in the guest room. He has moved what clothes he's kept into the wardrobe next to Sebastian's uniforms, and filled the empty floor of the butler's room with his own games. He has a dart-board leaning against the wall, and he sits and throws the darts into it one by one— _thunk. Thunk. Thunk_. While Sebastian does the day's accounting at the desk.

"Sebastian?"

"Yes, my lord?" Sebastian says, with some weariness. It is, he has already explained, terribly inefficient to keep interrupting him, when if he only waited until the butler was done with his work, they might talk without interruption.

That's all right. He doesn't care about Sebastian's ease.

"Have you 'kept me the way I am'?"

"What does the young master mean by that?" Sebastian says. He is in his shirtsleeves, and he puts down the pen that has been poised over the inkwell, as if he realizes that this question is going to be a long one.

"I haven't grown," he says. "Not the way Ciel has." (He has lost all his baby teeth, yes. He has changed, matured in some strange imperceptible way—lost the angles of hunger that had drawn his face after _that month_ and replaced it with a porcelain perfection) "Was he right that it was your influence to blame?"

Sebastian scoots his chair out, at that, and looks at him with that concerned frown that has began to linger over his features these past days. He doesn't like it. Sebastian, of all people—all things—has never looked concerned. It makes him think that the butler is as thrown by all of this as he is. And of course he is. This is the one thing they had never planned for, never even anticipated. All this.

"I assume so," Sebastian says, after a pause.

"And what does my butler mean by that?" he drawls.

"It means that if it was so—and I agree that is the likeliest explanation—I was not doing it consciously. I have never had a contract with anyone in their formative years, the way I have had with you, and I have rarely had one approaching this strength."

"I can't forgive this, you understand," he says casually. "After all those taunts about my height! I should have known."

"My lord," Sebastian says, scandalized, but he just chuckles, and throws another dart into the board. It doesn't bother him—not really. Not any more than any of the other annoyances he has about Sebastian, like his obsession for cats, for one. He has had Sebastian's influence in his very being. It is only natural that is would be expressed in every way, when they belong to each other so completely.

Sebastian makes an irritated noise before going back to his work, finally finishing it and then chiding him to his feet, telling him he ought to take a bath. He might bring it in, but the metal tubs would hardly fit in the butler's room next to the toys, desk, wardrobe, and games, and somehow he doesn't mind taking one in the laundry room, when the night has gotten so dark, and the rest of the servants have safely retired to their beds.

Under the soft noise of pouring water, in the large and empty room, filled with paraphernalia for the coming day, they speak of their plans for tomorrow; letting no word loose its way into the air, for prying reaper ears; one small, wet hand held by one gloved one, dampness spreading through the fibres. Each brush and tap of a finger disguised as something else.

.

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	3. In the Hall of the Mountain King

**3\. In the Hall of the Mountain King**

* * *

The time she was in the Sphere Music Hall had enclosed itself around her, like a tide. At first she really was just caught by the camaraderie, by the brightness that seemed to infuse every interaction between strangers, that stripped down the barriers of social niceties and allowed everyone to be nothing more than who they were. There was music, and dancing. And, if Elizabeth was to tell the truth, Blavat: no matter how coarse, how unsettling the look in his pale violet eyes; with only a glance he reached to her deepest thought and made them plain to see. Elizabeth has always been a chameleon. She knows how to deflect, to talk about others rather than herself. Sometimes her own thoughts scare her, so she tries not to think of them. Sometimes her own thoughts seem far too shadowed for the bright person she tries to be; the sun may dance off the shallow water, but underneath, she feels cold currents, selfishness, and worse. Being seen was far too thrilling to pass up, far too terrifying a prospect to merely walk away from.

She had been courted, she realizes now. Letting her know the simple joys of community, giving her bracelets to prove her place, letting her into the inner circle to make her feel responsible. Ciel—the real Ciel—hadn't merely tried to steal her away, as though his being her fiancé made it a matter of course. If he had, she doesn't know what would have happened, but she thinks she wouldn't feel so lost now.

He had explained how, after their kidnapping, his younger brother had left him for dead to take his place as the heir.

They had brought her into meetings where Ciel and the Undertaker talked about things they never quite said out loud, but it was always about blood, blood entering her dreams, making her feel lightheaded. By the time she noticed the disappearances among the Sirius, she had felt a deathly fear closing in, but they didn't answer her questions: they never did.

"You shouldn't worry, Lizzy," Ciel says, putting one cold, pale hand to her cheek. "Everything will be fine. All you need to do is protect me with your sword, and it will turn out all right."

"Are you sure?" Lizzy asks. Standing with blades in hand, a habit she had started in the times when Ciel had been so weak he couldn't do anything but sleep fitfully, and cry out in his dreams.

"Yes," Ciel says. "You take so much onto yourself, Lizzy, it isn't healthy." He pulls her down beside him and she curls herself into his embrace, trying to hold on against the fear.

The fear started when she saw him the first time, and shattered her. She has been floating, suspended in mid-motion, since, and all she wants to do is stay in the warm dark and not have to think, because when she thinks, she feels more afraid than ever.

"It's just… I have this feeling that… perhaps something bad is happening," she whispers. "Have you asked Undertaker what he's really doing here? How he plans to save you?"

"Lizzy," Ciel says harshly. "I told you not to worry. How am I supposed to get better if you act this way around me?"

"I'm sorry," Lizzy says. Tears have risen to her eyes, and she feels so confused.

"Are you?" Ciel says coldly. For a moment, he looks more like _him_ than ever, if it weren't for the two blue eyes. She swallows, her mouth dry, feeling guilty, ashamed, but she doesn't know why. "If you were really sorry, Lizzy, I think you would try to help me. I've been alone for so long, and I thought that you, at least, would remember… how it used to be…"

"Oh, I do!"

"Then what is this?"

"I…"

"Trying to be an amateur detective, weeping at the slightest provocation, this isn't the Lizzy I know. Where is the carefree girl who didn't take anything to heart?"

Lizzy flinches back. "Aren't I her?" she asks. But her voice is so low she can hardly hear herself, and she hates the way it wavers thinly, filled with self-recrimination. She doesn't know where that girl went. Ciel—he was supposed to help her keep her innocence, but somehow she's shattered anyway, and become useless to him. (To which one? She dares not think.)

"Do what you're good at, Lizzy, and let others do the rest. Do you understand?"

She can't look at him.

"Do you understand?" he repeats, harshly.

"Yes."

Ciel's voice becomes sweet again. "You'll always have a place with me, Lizzy. This hall is as much your legacy as mine." He reaches up to a ceiling strewn with stars. "I'll give you the world, if you ask it of me. All I ask, in return, is you."

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End file.
